Second Hand Downloads

This may sound a bit crazy to you as it did me but there is a new outlet opening in America which plans to sell second hand digital music. In the days of music being sold physically on compact discs, vinyl and and cassettes it was always possible to take your music to the second hand music shop and sell them for some hard cash. It made a second hand music shop a great place to go for some cheap albums. Much better than paying the exorbitant prices like eighteen pounds for an eleven song album which I paid once.

Some bright sparks in America have decided that it should also be possible for people to be able to sell their digital music collection if they so wish. This sounds crazy to me at first. The nature of digital means you can make endless copies. Never ending stock would sound pretty good to retailers though. The plan is that once a song is sold by a shop that same file cannot be sold again but must be deleted. This sounds to me like the old music industry trying to shoehorn their old business models into the digital music age.

Music has a value at the original point of sale but that reduces dramatically once it's out of the stable. DRM files could theoretically be used to resell music but there will be someone out there who finds a way past it as there so often is. The whole system would need a certain amount of trust and technical jiggery pokery that I don't think the music industry can muster.

Another facet to reselling goods is that by their nature second hand goods are older than new ones so they may have less of a shelf life. Digital music doesn't degrade though so the used version is just as good as the new one. So this would be fantastic for consumers as it would give them the same product at half the price. It's another kick in the guts for artists and new rock bands though.